Podcast Episode: The Perilous Tide: Unpacking the Power of Conformity in ‘The Wave’

Pip: What if the most dangerous experiment in your school wasn't in the chemistry lab — it was in the classroom next door?

Mara: That's exactly the territory Anna Wilberforce takes us into this episode, with a film that turns a real 1967 social experiment into a warning about how quickly ordinary people embrace authoritarian movements.

Pip: Let's start with the film itself — and what it says about conformity.

The Perilous Tide: Conformity and Its Consequences

Mara: The question at the center of this film is deceptively simple: could a dictatorship take root in a modern, educated society? Dennis Gansel's 2008 German thriller, Die Welle, builds its entire argument around that question.

Pip: And the film doesn't let its characters off easy. Early in the experiment, teacher Rainer Wenger puts it directly to his students: "So you don't think there could be another dictatorship in Germany?"

Mara: Their answer tells you everything. One student, Jens, replies: "No, we are too enlightened now." That confidence — that immunity — is exactly what the film dismantles over the next hundred minutes.

Pip: The word "enlightened" doing a lot of heavy lifting there, considering what follows.

Mara: What follows is a structured classroom exercise that becomes something far darker. Wenger introduces uniforms, formal address, synchronized movement — small disciplines that create a powerful sense of unity. The students name themselves Die Welle, design a logo, develop a salute.

Pip: And the film is careful about who gets swept up and why. Tim, played by Frederick Lau — who won a German Film Award for the role — finds in The Wave something he never had before: belonging.

Mara: That's where the film earns its five stars. It doesn't present the students as foolish or weak. It shows how the allure of community, purpose, and identity can override critical thinking in almost anyone. Karo and Mona resist, and they pay a social price for it.

Pip: The film's cinematography reinforces all of this — handheld cameras that pull you inside the group's momentum, and Gansel reportedly framing Wenger's final speech to echo Nazi newsreel footage.

Mara: The climax is brutal and earned. Tim, unable to face the dissolution of the only identity that gave him meaning, shoots a fellow student and then himself. Wenger is arrested. The experiment's consequences are total and irreversible.

Mara: The film was shortlisted for an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film and screened at Sundance — recognition that its questions travel well beyond Germany.

Pip: From one classroom experiment to the broader question of how power persuades — that's where this conversation goes next.

Pip: The Wave keeps asking whether we'd recognize the tide before it took us under.

Mara: And the honest answer, which is the film's whole point, is probably not. Something to sit with before next episode.